Exploring Ecumenism

To God be the Glory

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This is part of a series of posts based on the Churches Together in England publication one light: one world.  If you click on the link you will find the biblical texts.  This post of the same name covers the purpose of this series.

Romans 11: 33-36

In this passage Paul builds upon what it means to love God.  The Good News is God's Kingdom is present in the here and now.  Paul can hear God's call to the whole of creation to explore God's riches, wisdom and knowledge.

But these things are just out of reach.  Who has known the mind of the Lord?  The question invites a positive answer but implies no-one can quite give such an answer.  It is this longing that draws on not only the churches, but the whole of humanity and indeed the whole of creation.

What we learn from modern cosmology is the whole creation is itself a response to God.  Evolution is matter's way of responding to God.  Against the constraints of entropy, life responds in ever more ordered ways.

One final point about this sequence of posts about the creation.  My purpose has been to make a theological point.  I have not attempted to prove God has a role in evolution.  What I'm suggesting  evolution itself is a response to God.  It is not that every individual aspires to know God but individuals are themselves a response to God.  It is not terribly important whether scientists agree with theologians on this point.  It will always be possible to understand evolution from both atheistic and theistic perspectives. 

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• The World Belongs to the Lord (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)

All of Creation Waits with Eager Longing

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This is part of a series of posts based on the Churches Together in England publication one light: one world.  If you click on the link you will find the biblical texts.  This post of the same name covers the purpose of this series.

Romans 8:19-23

Why evolution?  Why not create everything by design?  An answer is in this text.  We can see a purpose for evolution in this text.  All creation, living and non-living, strains towards God and is in some pain as it does so. 

Once again we are with the Oikoumene.  It is as if creation knows there has to be more than its immediate experience.

Our experience of modern cosmology is one of ultimate futility.  All things will come to an end.  Eventually, not only our own sun but all stars will burn out.  Creation will return to a soup of energy free chaotic matter.

But there is hope this creation is somehow a stepping stone to something else, it is as if the whole of creation is moving towards not death but new life.

We sometimes hear of the second coming, the belief that Jesus will return and put an end to all things.  This is sometimes known as eschatology.  Some people say the unity of the church is something we will discover at the end time; unity is eschatological.

But the thing that distinguishes life from death is its dynamic, life changes into more and more complex forms.  To give birth is to bring about new life.  Perhaps the eschaton is not so much unity as a new and reconciled life, increasingly diverse?

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Good News for All Nations

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This is part of a series of posts based on the Churches Together in England publication one light: one world.  If you click on the link you will find the biblical texts.  This post of the same name covers the purpose of this series.

Matthew 24: 14

In my last post I wrote of things evolving in order to respond to God's call.  In what sense are we asked to respond to God's call?  It is not merely recognising God's role in creation; to recognise God's role is to submit to God's rule.

Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God.  Once again we need to see this as an opportunity to respond to God's challenge rather than submit to control.  We need to be highly suspicious of those who argue the Kingdom is like an earthly Kingdom, only bigger with scarier punishments.  This sort of argument merely masks their own lust for power.

It is obvious as we read the Gospels, Jesus is ironic in his use of the word Kingdom.  This Kingdom is one where the powerful serve the powerless.  We are invited to compare it with the Kingdoms we experience on earth.  There would be little point in doing so if God's Kingdom is essentially business as usual for despots.

This is why the Kingdom is good news and needs to be proclaimed across the whole world.  It would not be good news if this were a proclamation of business as usual.

Matthew is of course aware of how unlikely radical obedience to God will be.  Once it has been proclaimed to all nations, the end will come.  The end appears to have been indefinitely postponed!

The World Belongs to the Lord

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This is part of a series of posts based on the Churches Together in England publication one light: one world.  If you click on the link you will find the biblical texts.  This post of the same name covers the purpose of this series.

Psalm 24: 1-2

It is interesting to compare the first line in the NRSV version with the paraphrase in Churches' Together in England's title (above).  'The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it'.  The word 'belongs' implies ownership, as if the world is God's property.  To say the earth is the Lord's implies it is the Lord's in the sense that a work of art is the artist's.  If I buy a Picasso it is mine but the painting is still his.

One point I have made many times is, ecumenism is a part of the wider Oikoumene, which stands for the reconciliation of all things to God.  The world is God's and God calls to all created things.  Evolution is their response to God's call.

In what sense is this world God's?  There's not a lot to go on in this particular text.  The focus is not on God designing animals and plants but in setting the parameters of seas and rivers.  Perhaps the image is of God the theatre owner, who maintains the theatre in order that others might put on plays?  There might be a tendency to forget the theatre owner's work at the final curtain.

The Lord Encompasses All

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This is part of a series of posts based on the Churches Together in England publication one light: one world.  If you click on the link you will find the biblical texts.  This post of the same name covers the purpose of this series.

Isaiah 40: 21-26

This is about God's power and yet it is interesting to look at how it is exercised. 

Before I do that, it is important to remember the writers of this text had a different cosmology to the Newtonian one most of us cling to despite the massive changes that have taken place in physics over the last century, sometimes referred to as quantum mechanics.

These changes in cosmology are not necessarily a problem.  They have happened before during the history of Christianity and do not invalidate the main points of the Jewish and Christian faiths. 

At first glance, in this passage we have an all powerful God who exercises power over creation.  But look closer, there is nothing about design - God sits above, stretches the heavens, makes rulers as nothing, brings out the host, numbers them.  Just about anything but design.

This powerful God certainly interacts with creation, sometimes in ways which might not be welcomed.  But this is not a God who is in control. 

God lays the foundations; creates the environment in which creation evolves.  God asks questions of God's creation.  They are rhetorical questions, that draw attention to God.  God is saying, don't lose yourself in creation, can't you see there is more to it than your immediate environment? 

It is a call to transcend where we are and seek something else entirely.  Is this the same call heard by atoms and molecules as they form the first life?  The same call as that heard by single cells as they become multi-cellular? 

The call is to know God.  Things evolve, according to our modern cosmology, in order to discover God.

Similar questions are asked of human beings and various faith traditions have evolved to help those who will listen encounter God. 

It Was Very Good

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This is part of a series of posts based on the Churches Together in England publication one light: one world.  If you click on the link you will find the biblical texts.  This post of the same name covers the purpose of this series.

Genesis 1:26-31

I have written a great deal in this blog about evolution and there is more to come!  If we understand conversation to be a primary act, then we need to see it in all things; the conversations between churches are but one example. 

The views of creationists and neo-Darwinians focus on the idea of design. I find this a static and unhelpful understanding of evolution.  Design implies the sort of effort a human being puts into making a watch.  It has a purpose and designs for watches (or bicycles or cars or computers) are largely convergent, we soon learn what works and so continue to design along similar lines.  When we look at the design of a watch we see geometrical shapes, which we cannot see anywhere in a kitten, for example.

I prefer to think in terms of a conversation.  Evolution is an ongoing conversation at many levels between living organisms and their environment.  The theist might wish to add to that conversations between God and the material world.  I've no time to explore this further but will return to it in the future I am sure.

Verse 31, seems to be evidence of this.  God speaks earlier in the narrative and now God sees the effects of his words; how has creation responded?  If God were the all-powerful designer, as neo-Darwinists seem to imagine, why would God need to look?  Creation would be perfect because it had been designed by a perfect designer.  These words 'it was very good' seem to be God's judgement on a creation that is not essentially predictable because it has freedom to grow and develop in its own way.

We are in danger of thinking God has a design for the church.  But if the liberation of the Holy Spirit is real there cannot be a design; we are free to develop our relationships as we see fit.  The spirit calls us to base relationships on love and they grow out of love not some heavenly prescribed design

Most Things Don't Work

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I suppose I approach ecumenism not so much from the perspective of an academic theologian, as that of a community development worker.  One insight I developed over many frustrating years is, 'Most things don't work'.  This is equally true of ecumenism.

The history of ecumenism is littered with initiatives that haven't worked.  Usually, they are voted down by the council of one church or another and many more never get off the drawing board.

I suspect this insight occurred to me because before community development, I was a research scientist in the field of biology.  I discovered most experiments don't work but failure is fundamental to evolution.  Evolution is based on the principle of most things not working.

Of course, a few things do work.  But it is a fallacy to believe it is the best things that survive.  I suspect many scientists have difficulty remembering this, it is easy to assume the best has been selected.  This is because Western philosophy is strongly influenced by Plato and his idea of the (platonic) ideal. 

Theologians are influenced by the same ideals and the last gasp struggle of the proponents of 'intelligent design' demonstrate Plato's ideal is far from dead.  We need to understand, in evolution as much as the church, the Spirit works through diversity and chaos. 

The problem is, as humanity has become self-aware, we tend to undermine the harmony in creation in our search for order, design and perfection.  The place to seek God is not in the illusion of order and perfection but in what appears to be random.

It is an interesting question - what is random?  How do we know something is random?  One extreme would be to argue randomness is lack of knowledge; beneath the sequence of apparently random numbers there are causes.  For example, take pseudo-random numbers.  There is no way of distinguishing a good sequence of pseudo random numbers from genuine random numbers.

Now this might be a source of rejoicing for creationists except for one minor problem.  Nature doesn't use numbers.  Reality might be nudged by God but how it responds to any nudge must be unpredictable.

The history of religion has always been the struggle between those who seek to impose order on God's creation, and those who value freedom to respond to God spontaneously.  If we insist on imposing order on our churches, then splits are inevitable.  We can choose to make our ideals absolute and split the church.  Or we can agree splits are inevitable.  This means we all have freedom to be heretics, as all spirit led people are, alongside the apparently ordered life the churches. 

There is nothing to fear from heresy because most things don't work!  There is everything to fear from orthodoxy (whatever type) because it uses force to impose order that does not exist.

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Harmony and Control

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Self-awareness introduces control into creation.  This may be the significance of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  Whereas evolution proceeds with great freedom, once humanity became self-aware there was temptation to control its trajectory.  This urge to control is known as sin.

And so we observe ideologies of control; people who seek to impose their understanding of perfection upon the world.  This is sometimes known as platonification, after the philosopher Plato who argued everything is a reflection of perfect forms.  We find it in the imposition of mathematical models on reality.  Those Christians who insist nature has a designer are doing the same thing.  Sadly, some formal ecumenical conversations have the same aim.

The material world self-organises and needs no designer.  Design, whether of watches or of ideal societies (including united churches) is a result of self-awareness.  It is this imposition of concepts of perfection onto the world, that we know as sin.  This is because our concepts of perfection fall short of reality, miss the mark.  Of course, imposition of perfection is in reality imposition of will, of a will to power, which can be seen in domestic abuse, warfare and all attempts to control others.

Design differs from evolution in its adherence to physical laws.  The designer knows about the laws of thermodynamics, of gravity and various other physical constraints and uses those laws to power their machine or architecture.  Life uses the same laws in different ways.  Knock over a chair and it will stay where it is.  Knock over a human being and they can get up under their own steam.  Whilst no physical laws are broken, the motivation for life is much harder to understand than the mechanical principles of a machine or bureaucracy.

Contrary to the desire for power of creationists, chance is evidence of God, not design.  Design demonstrates human intervention.  What we see in nature is complexity, the interaction of chaos and order; the dynamic and the static.  Complexity arises from matter's innate power to self-organise.

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Harmony in Diversity

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Usually ecumenists talk of 'unity in diversity'.  I heard an interview with Jane Chittister, where she suggested 'harmony in diversity' as an alternative.  Chittister is an American theologian.  What follows are my own reflections (although I might be unconsciously influenced by what she said).

Harmony in diversity seems more dynamic than unity in diversity.  Unity in diversity implies we might arrive at a final united state for all the churches.  The contradiction in 'unity in diversity' has always bothered me.  It feels like diversity is a concession while unity is the real business.

Harmony requires diversity.  Nothing we know of creation or of God implies static finality.  Our experience of life is change. 

Some will say God is unchanging.  If God is unchanging, it is only insofar as we conceive of God as embracing the whole of space and time, 'he is the lord of all that is and all that is to be'.  But our experience of God is also of change because we encounter God in time and space.  Even if eternity is unchanging, what does this mean in practice?  If the nature of eternity is change, how can we assert it is in any sense static?

Why is change so important?  Ultimately it is about consciousness.  We can understand evolution as mindless random change but even so we see matter self-organise into stars and planets and life.  Life that in time has become self-aware.  So, there is a possibility evolution need no longer be mindless. The pooling of the small consciousness of each particle of matter (that enables it to self-organise) leads to increasing awareness through evolution.

As living creatures become more conscious they shape their environments.  Now human beings, through science and prayer, reflect upon the nature of creation and join with God in the creative act.

The implications of this for ecumenism are profound.  If we do not encourage harmony in diversity, the alternative might be the stultifying unity we have seen before in Christendom.  Self-awareness causes its own contradictions and they will be the theme for the next post in this series.

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Is Evolution Calvinist?

And so we arrive at Wesley's third great doctrine : Sanctification.  If Justification  is the decision to tread the narrow path between order and chaos; between license and morality, then Sanctification is how in practice we tread that path.  Sanctification is a lifelong journey; nothing like a life committed to one or the other of those so-called alternatives.

Wesley's theology is future-orientated.  For Calvinists, God is the all-powerful creator, who made the world, just so.  Everything was determined from the very beginning, down to who will and who will not be saved.  Their focus is on the past.

For Wesleyans, the future is more important.  From humanity's perspective, creation is incomplete.  The invitation is to contribute to the completion of God's creation.  This means all people can be saved.  Nothing is predestined.